IMF makes New Arrangement to Borrow (NAB) as European meltdown nears; how much the countries would pay in an attempt to save Europe?

The IMF activated the so-called New Arrangements to Borrow in April of this year for a six-month period. The IMF’s board, which met informally on the issue late Friday afternoon, would have to approve re-activation of the resource pool if the fund wants to tap it beyond September.

According to the IMF, the pool of supplementary resources are only to be activated when "needed to forestall or cope with a threat to the international monetary system." The pool can only be activated by the board after IMF managing director makes a special request.

And while America is guaranteed to foot the bill once again (with China below the US in terms of priority payments despite its much higher cost basis and implicit investment into Europe), it will do so only on a provisional basis – none of the biggest IMF contributors have enacted the formal quota increase. Which means that the US will be stuck in legal limbo when Europe pulls a Greece, collects American cash, and then finds it has no collateral to pay back with. From Dow Jones:

So far, the IMF has already allocated nearly $7 billion from the NAB. In total, the NAB can provide up to about $580 billion in supplemental resources to the IMF, but only around $331 billion is currently available for use. Based on how much cash the fund can commit to within the next year–around $394 billion–without the special kitty, the IMF would only have around $60 billion on hand.

The special resource base, funded through bilateral loans from countries such as the U.S. and China, was designed as a temporary measure. It is expected to be largely replaced by an agreement late last year by the fund’s board of directors to increase quotas, the share of contributions that each member must give to fund IMF lending.

The board of governors agreed in December to roughly double quotas from around $375 billion to around $750 billion. But out of the 187 member countries, only 17 have legally accepted the increase, including Japan, the U.K. and Korea. Most of the countries with the biggest quotas, such as the U.S., China and Germany, haven’t yet gone through the legal process, such as parliamentary or congressional approval, need to hand over their promised dues.

There is little we can add here that was not said during one of the two prior massive IMF intervention attempts, both of which predicted a huge global shake up within months.

Here is list of countries and amount they would contribute as per new arrangements:

The complete set of IMF Direction of Trade Statistics and IMF International Financial Statistics are available free via the Economic and Social Data Service, which requires using you university/college username and password (you will have to register first: details are given on the site)

This is a US government site, but it gives international as well as US data.

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